Question about installing python and modules on Red Hat Linux 6

[Michael Torrie]

On 11/15/2014 06:08 PM, Steven D'Aprano wrote:
> Assuming it was RHEL 6, then installing Python 2.7 from source as a separate
> application from the system Python should be trivially easy, half an hour's
> work. Download the source, untar, run ./configure, make, make altinstall
> and you should be done. There may be a few bumps in the road to get
> optional components supported, in which case a skilled Linux admin (which I
> am not) might need perhaps a couple of hours. Depending on just how bad the
> bumps were, an unskilled admin like me might take a day or so, not three
> weeks, before giving up.

In my last system administration job, we forbade installing from source,
at least in the manner you are describing.  It's a maintenance
nightmare.  Especially when it comes time to upgrade the system and get
things up and running on a new OS version.  To make the system
maintainable and re-creatable (it's easy to dump a list of installed
packages to install on anther machine), it had to be done using the
package manager.  Preferably with trusted packages (trusted
repositories) that were actively maintained.  At that time Red Hat
software collections didn't exist, so I did have to spend some
considerable time building and testing RPM packages.  Yes it's a
headache for the developer in the short term, but in the long term it
always turned out better than hacking things together from source.

The OP hasn't said that this is the case for his client of course.